#YourAverageMuslim: Ruptural geopolitics of British Muslim women's media and fashion

Abstract

Muslima lifestyle media and fashion are reshaping global media, leisure and recreation, and creating new spaces of identification and belonging in predominantly Western-liberal societies. Typically educated and upwardly mobile, British Muslim women working as cultural producers in media and fashion are finding strategies for challenging stereotypes and resisting socio-economic exclusion. Bringing into dialogue discourses on gender and creative labour with feminist geopolitics and the notion of ruptural (geo)politics, this article reveals the ways in which Muslim women are advancing education and career pathways in emergent creative fields. Informed by interviews, site visits, and discourse analysis of social media channels, it gives emphasis to everyday negotiations at home, in the work-place and on-line. By interrogating notions of Muslimness and womanhood, British Muslim women in media and fashion are re-negotiating familial, community, institutional and societal norms in the contemporary time. At the vanguard of change, then, leading cultural producers and activists are crossing borders in the labour market, and making new images of Muslim women that challenge conservative and Western-liberal thinking on Islam, work, gender and equality.